When most people think of increased salaries, they think about the main cities in the US like New York, Chicago, Washington DC, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. However, Fairbanks, Alaska has all of these cities beat in salary increase. Click below to read more.
Fairbanks, Alaska may not the first place you’d think of for booming wage growth. But according to research done by the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI) that analyzed wage data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the most lucrative salary gains for workers from 2010 to 2011 were in the remote Alaskan city, home to Fort Wainwright military base and the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
The research found 370 out of 395 metros — 94% — saw wage and salary growth over that time period. MPI broke down its findings into two groups: overall metros with the biggest average wage increases, and large metros (those with over one million people) with the biggest increases. The lists are below, courtesy of TheAtlanticCities.com.
Workers in Fairbanks saw an average annual salary increase of $2,700, while Bloomington, Ind., and Iowa City, Iowa, followed with $2,460 and $2,330, respectively.
The report notes that most of the larger cities had high salaries to begin with, just as many of the metros in the first list were starting from smaller annual wages. Three of the top 10 large metros had average wages of over $60,000 a year, and only Fairbanks among the overall metros list had an average wage above $50,000 in 2011.
Click the Yahoo! link below to see the salary chart.
